I have been reading my way through “The Diet Survivor’s Handbook” by Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel. It has a short chapter on something I never would have imagined having to do in my lifetime - legalising healthy foods.

They say:

Common examples might include apples, oranges, carrots, celery, cottage cheese and salads. You may find that now whenever you eat or think about eating one of these foods, you feel like you’re back on a diet. As a result you avoid these foods, even if they are what your body naturally craves.

I know I was guilty of that a few weeks ago. Why have apples when you can have cream cakes?!
One word: satisfaction. You can’t satisfy a craving for an apple with a cream cake, just as you can’t satisfy a craving for a cream cake with an apple.

It reminds me of the calorie example in the Beyond Chocolate book. You want a mini roll, but instead you have enough healthy foods to equal the mini roll through the morning, then you go and have the mini roll anyway because you want it, then you’ve “blown it” so you eat two more! The moral of the story: if you resist what you want, you will end up eating your way round it before eventually eating it anyway because what you resist, persists! I know the example is a mini roll (usually a “bad” food) but it works just as well for healthy foods. If you eat something else because you are afraid of being “too good” (whatever that is!) then you will end up overeating just the same as when you were on a diet.

I am still craving fruit and vegetables like there will be none left tomorrow! When I imagine eating other foods, my intuition tells me they will sit too heavily in my stomach and I won’t feel happy. Thank heavens the Tesco order is coming tomorrow, lots of lovely fruit and vegetables, yum!

The chapter I am just reaching now is chapter 20 - “Once you have become an attuned eater, reaching for food when you are not physically hungry signals that something is bothering you. Nudge yourself to learn more about feelings. This is something that I am just getting to grips with at the moment. I get fed up waiting to get hungry sometimes. My hunger signal is virtually none existant, even when I wait all day! Perhaps I need to drop that principle for a while, until I am off my anti-depressants when I will be able to figure out if the tablets are suppressing my appetite.

Another crappy day.
I was up late, reading, and then Ben has been at work today and the house is a mess. He promised to clean up the kitchen and playroom before he left but he overslept. Normally I would have been able to cope but I think the lack of sleep just about finished me off, so I have been scraping my way through the day doing nothing productive at all, except eating biscuits that taste rubbish and I don’t even want.

I’m starting to feel paranoid again as well. I know it is just my depression playing tricks on me, but I start thinking nobody likes me, they only say nice things to me because they feel they should, that Ben is only with me because he pities me, that my kids wish they had a better mum, I’ve even started telling myself that I have only got an interview for Chocolate Fairy training because everyone who applies gets one(!)… Oh list goes on. It’s pretty pathetic really, but I know “pulling myself together” won’t work and I am learning to sit with it and just feel it instead of going into self-destruct mode like I always used to.

I have started going right off food as well. It’s hard because I still never really feel hungry even if I don’t eat all day, but now I look in my cupboards and there is just nothing. It’s packed full of stuff that I normally love but no luck.

I think I have found something to wear to my interview, but they don’t have any in stock at the moment which is frustrating! I was really worried about that, as I hate clothes shopping at this size. I think I need to work on accepting my size. I’ve been a bit bloated over the last couple of days as well and I don’t know whether to buy the next size up jeans or not. My current ones are just on the uncomfortable side, but if I’m going to go back down again in a couple of days then I might as well save my money.

I was just reading Janey’s blog and she finished her post for today with “Still room for improvement though!” and it reminded me of something I have read in the last few months but I couldn’t remember where.

I searched on google and found this on a blog by a man called Manish Verma.

If everything we attempted in life were achieved with a minimum of effort and came out exactly as planned, how little we would learn-and how boring life would be! And how arrogant we would become if we succeeded at everything we attempted. Failure allows us to develop the essential quality of humility. It is not easy-when you are the person experiencing failure-to accept it philosophically, serene in the knowledge that this is one of life’s great learning experiences. But it is. Nature’s ways are not always easily understood, but they are repetitive and therefore predictable. You can be absolutely certain that when you feel you are being most unfairly tested, you are being prepared for great achievement.

Courtesy: Napoleon Hill Foundation.

I had never thought of it that way. Imagine having nothing to improve on. I imagine at first it would be a little cool to be the best at everything you cared about, but then it would get boring. What would you fill your days with without improving yourself?

——–

Today, apart from receiving the wonderful news about the interview, has been pretty dull. I have had no desire to do anything. I managed to spill burning hot ratatouille all over myself and dinner was a big glass of orange and mango juice with duck pate on one slice of bread. I need to give in to this tiredness!

I’m considering starting running. I was going to do this before I found out I was pregnant with Leo. I’ve got a fantastic book on running called Running Made Easy by Susie Whalley and Lisa Jackson. I might fish out my running shoes, buy some clothes suitable for running in and start doing it. I need something active to fill my time between now and September.

Maybe I could run to the gym while I’m at it!

I’ve got an interview for the Chocolate Fairy Training!

Nervous, excited but hopeful would sum up how I am feeling! Now I need to figure out which hotel to book as I’d rather be in London the night before than stress about travelling down there in rush hour.

Ooooh!

What to wear? What to wear? Does an interview qualify for an excuse to buy new shoes? I think so, don’t you?

Today is going ok. I am finding it easier to wait until I am hungry now, but my hungry signal is still very subtle. I had a lovely prawn stirfry tonight with spring onions, courgettes, tatsoi & mooli. I’ve never had mooli before but it was similar to waterchestnuts. I don’t feel quite so pulled towards the kitchen as I used to. Sometimes I think “Ooh I could just eat”, but then I tune in and realise I am not really hungry at all and then I check to see how I’m feeling and as usual it’s often loneliness or boredom.

Today is the first day of the six week holidays that I have been home alone with both children. It has been a bit of a mish-mash of a day today and both of them were being a handful so I think I am going to structure the days a bit more from tomorrow, for my sanity as much as theirs!

I am still reading “Fat, So?” by Susannah Jowitt. It’s quite funny but it is very fact based rather than really having any new ideas or anything. Still, it is interesting to read about the histories of the diets and about how complex the weight/health/activity balance can be.

It’s hard to believe that in five days time we will have been living in our new house for a month! And I still haven’t changed my gym membership. I will try and do that tonight, and I will try and find my mp3 player as well. I need to start getting some decent sleep as well now that I have to be up so early for the children. My anti-depressants make me so tired. Four hours after taking them I can’t keep my eyes open and they keep me extremely drowsy for twelve hours. I take them at night but if I forget to take them til after 8pm it’s makes for a really hard morning.

The food shopping arrived last night, and my efforts to keep the biscuit tin filled seem to have gone a bit crazy. The biscuit tin is full and I have a further three packets in the cupboard! I think chocolate supplies are dropping, I have about two bars in total. The crisps just aren’t getting eaten at all. I’m finding it hard to get excited about food at the moment which is half relief but also half frustation.

Oh, but I did somehow manage to forget to buy any fruit! Goodness knows how. I have been really enjoying fruit lately. I think I will pick some up from the market on Thursday instead.

I have just emailed my application for Chocolate Fairy training.
Oh my goodness!
I am so excited and so nervous.
My fingers are well and truly crossed :O)

—-

In other news - I’ve had an ok weekend. I’ve finished reading Geneen Roth’s Breaking Free from Emotional Eating and I am so glad I bought it. She touches on a few areas that I hadn’t even considered towards the end of the book. I recommend it to anybody.

I am now reading “Fat, So?” by Susannah Jowitt which is subtitled “For anyone who’s ever wondered why they just can’t managed to eat less.” I’m only a few pages in but it seems like it’s going to be a good light-hearted read, full of laughs.

Today I am not hungry at all but have eaten a quarter of jam sandwich and one and a half digestive biscuits. I am really craving vegetables at the moment but I am all out until the Sainsbury’s van arrives between 5-6pm.

Janey on the Minimins forum has quoted part of my blog and told me that it helped her to discover that intuitive eating isn’t about eating junk because you are allowed to, but that it is about eating whatever you want because you are allowed to - be that a chocolate bar, an orange or some avocado houmous on a rice cake!

I actually posted this on Minimins but I wanted to keep it for my own reference.

Intuitive eating is not about eating piles of junk. It is about listening to your body, listening to your intuition and listening to what it tells you about when you are hungry and what it wants you to feed it.
Intuitive eating is also known as normal eating. It is about just eating normally, without diets giving us rules, without listening to compulsions formed by emotional problems, without punishing it by eating too much or for the wrong reasons, without depriving it of foods that bring us pleasure simply because Dr. X says it is “bad” for us. If a food is wrong for your body, your body lets you know.

If your body says “please feed me healthy foods” then to feed it healthy foods would be eating intuitively. The task that says to bring lots of chocolate into your house is not about eating lots of chocolate because you have it, it’s about normalising chocolate, removing the word “bad” or “fattening” from it, because it isn’t bad or naughty, it’s just a food.

Good quality chocolate has some great health benefits, and eaten in an amount that is appropriate to our own bodies, therefore a personal amount our body accepts it. Bad quality chocolate has little health benefits, if any at all, therefore our body will only accept small amounts or even nothing before it starts to let you know in varying degrees that it doesn’t appreciate being filled with poor quality foods.

Allowing all foods into your diet isn’t about eating all foods, it’s about being allowed to eat all foods but you making the call on whether you want to eat them or not. It’s about you holding the responsibility, not giving it to your Weight Watchers leader or similar. You make the call. It’s your body, your food, your decision.

The Beyond Chocolate approach also includes being kind to yourself. This is a major piece of the puzzle for me. If I berate myself for eating lots of chocolate, I feel down and I end up eating again because I have internalised societies morals on eating.

We can’t be moral about eating and eat intuitively. It doesn’t really go hand in hand. So whilst I said it isn’t about eating lots of chocolate, it is also not about NOT eating lots of chocolate. It’s about listening to your body, listening to your mind and making the judgement about what you really want. It’s also about overriding your body and saying “No, I want chocolate and I know it is going to make me feel rubbish in a few minutes/hours, but right now I want to eat it and I am prepared to live with the consequences” if that is what you want to do.

It is not easy to move from dieting to intuitive eating, especially when we are bombarded by dieting messages of morality from every source of the media.

Also, the Beyond Chocolate method encorporates moving your body in a way that works for you, and not focusing on the weight loss benefits but focusing on the pleasure that it can bring when you allow yourself to enjoy it, the way we enjoyed it as children when we ran in parks, played kerby or football or kiss-chase.

The other things that I have learned from BC are that it is ok to be sad or angry and that I don’t have to hide those feelings. It’s also ok for me to get it wrong (and by wrong, I mean eating in a way that is ignoring any intuition but eating compulsively instead - it is wrong for me, it isn’t necessarily wrong for everyone) sometimes, I don’t have to do it all, and when I do get it wrong I don’t have to jack it all in. I have also learned that I have the chance to take responsibility for myself and that I don’t have to do things the way everyone else does and I don’t have to answer to anybody, and certainly not people who criticise the way I eat or how I look.

That is what intuitive eating is about for me.

I’ve had a bit of a revelation with intuitive eating lately.

I had taken IE as to mean I should include “naughty” foods into my life and eat them regularly. But now I see that it isn’t that at all. Now that the “naughty” foods are part of my everyday life, they are just everyday things, which means I am equally as satisfied by an orange. If I want chocolate, I have chocolate, but if I want an orange, I don’t eat chocolate because its “naughty” and therefore fun, I eat an orange, because that is what I want.

I find this tuning in thing quite hard. Tuning in to my hunger is hard enough because my signal seems really quite weak. I seem to be neutral most of the time and then very suddenly reach ravenous. But the next step for me is tuning in to what the food I want is. My mind is often shouting “chocolate! cookies! cream!” when my body says “I’ll just take an orange, thanks”. I like eating vegetables, lot of them, and fruit. It sits better in my stomach than chocolate does, so I am gradually starting to naturally gravitate towards them.

I like getting the hang of this. Now I want to learn how to be kind to myself when my natural reaction is to shout “No, greedy pig, if you eat that you’ll be a real fatty!”. I’m still reading Geneen Roth’s “Breaking Free from Emotional Eating” and I’m picking up more and more tips.

I’m so glad I chose this path. It’s blooming hard work but for once I understand the meaning of delayed gratification :)

I think I was more tired than I realised yesterday. Thankfully I had the support of the girls on the Beyond Chocolate forum to come to my rescue and point out what I was too fretful to see. I’ve slept and rested a lot of the day today, I had a bath about an hour ago and I’m feeling much better now.

My books from Amazon arrived - one box yesterday and one box today so I now have six books to keep me busy and a copy of Beyond Chocolate to pass on to my mum. I’ve read about a third of “When You Eat At The Refrigerator…” and I’m about a third into “Breaking Free from Emotional Eating” as well. They are both Geneen Roth books. The “When You Eat..” one is great. It’s set out into fifty small sections of ways to help you get feeling better when you are being down on yourself. “Breaking Free…” is similar to Beyond Chocolate but a little wordier and obviously more American. It has a few new suggestions in it which I am glad I have been able to add to my “tool-belt” but I’m definitely a Beyond Chocolate girl :oD

One thing I have noticed over the last couple of days is how much it affects me when someone is too busy to give me support. I also depend on people to notice when I am down, rather than just telling them. I suppose I always think that if someone loves me they should be aware of me to notice that I am down. I am gradually getting more and more used to asking for help. It does seem easier to ask for help from people that I don’t know well than from people that I do.

I had a bit of an odd meal today. First a bowl of organic carrot batons, boiled and then with a teaspoon of butter stirred in. This was absolutely delicious. It had a kind of nutty flavour to it as well. I’m not sure if that was because I was actually paying attention or whether it was because they were organic but they were brilliant. I then had three squares of chocolate (served myself four but felt indifferent about the last square so I put it back in the cupboard) and lastly a slice of bread with paté on it followed by one grape. I felt satisfied but not full and felt OK to stop eating.

I think I need to be kinder to myself when I am having a hard time. I think I was overanalysing and thinking that if I started binging last night then I never would have stopped. Now I’m feeling better about things, I can see that it was ok to want chocolate last night, and I can have chocolate when I actually want to sleep, but that a sleep will do me better. It’s ok for me to have both, and it’s ok for me to choose just one of them.

Gosh this is never what I had imagined when I first heard of BC. I am so glad that everything is coming out now though. I have repressed so many feelings, it (eventually) feels good once it is all out!

Rubbish day.
I am mostly frustrated that I had been doing so well over the last week or so, but today feels like a big release of frustration and resentment and like I just want to lash out.
I don’t really have much of an idea why. I’m sure it can’t possibly still be about the incident with my husband’s dinner on Monday night. I have had a tiring day, walking to pre-school and then going to fetch my car from Ben’s workplace as I couldn’t face walking there and back again and then Ben not coming home till 8.30pm this evening. Maybe I’m just tired.

I’m struggling to actually feel what it is I am feeling because I am so used to just ignoring it and making myself feel good (and then worse) by eating nice things. I am struggling to notice the difference between hungry and not hungry and even when I eat my hunger level doesn’t seem to move. I keep zoning out whilst eating, probably because I am eating in front of the television, all the while telling myself I’m “doing it all wrong” and “need to do it properly”.

I just want the indecision in my head to shut the hell up and just leave me be for a while.

So I gave in and ate chocolate and climbed in bed and typed this.

Now I can feel I’m repressing something, and while I don’t know what it is, I can feel I need to let it out by crying. Why am I berating myself again and telling myself not to be so effing immature?